Market Pulse
Market Pulse
The Infrastructure Layer Land Grab Behind Workday's Acquisition Spree
Workday has acquired six AI-related companies since February. Six infrastructure platforms in under a year—HiredScore, Evisort, Sana Labs for $1.1 billion, Flowise, and now Pipedream with its 3,000 pre-built connectors. That's not normal acquisition velocity for enterprise software.
Look at what Workday is actually buying: not reasoning capabilities or elegant interfaces, but authentication layers, integration platforms, connection infrastructure. The unglamorous plumbing that sits between agents and the fragmented reality of enterprise systems. The companies moving fastest aren't building better AI. They're assembling control points for where agents can operate at all.
The Infrastructure Layer Land Grab Behind Workday's Acquisition Spree
Workday has acquired six AI-related companies since February. Six infrastructure platforms in under a year—HiredScore, Evisort, Sana Labs for $1.1 billion, Flowise, and now Pipedream with its 3,000 pre-built connectors. That's not normal acquisition velocity for enterprise software.
Look at what Workday is actually buying: not reasoning capabilities or elegant interfaces, but authentication layers, integration platforms, connection infrastructure. The unglamorous plumbing that sits between agents and the fragmented reality of enterprise systems. The companies moving fastest aren't building better AI. They're assembling control points for where agents can operate at all.
Where AI Agent Value Is Actually Concentrating
When Microsoft merged two orchestration frameworks last month, most coverage focused on technical architecture. From our operational position running millions of web agent sessions, we saw a different signal: the problems that seemed defensibly complex six months ago are converging into common patterns.
Managing authentication across thousands of sites simultaneously shows you something about which problems stay hard and which ones don't. The capital flows in November—over $3.5 billion into AI infrastructure—suggest smart money is betting on layers most vendors aren't emphasizing. Where is defensibility actually building in this market?
Where AI Agent Value Is Actually Concentrating
When Microsoft merged two orchestration frameworks last month, most coverage focused on technical architecture. From our operational position running millions of web agent sessions, we saw a different signal: the problems that seemed defensibly complex six months ago are converging into common patterns.
Managing authentication across thousands of sites simultaneously shows you something about which problems stay hard and which ones don't. The capital flows in November—over $3.5 billion into AI infrastructure—suggest smart money is betting on layers most vendors aren't emphasizing. Where is defensibility actually building in this market?
Surface Story, Deeper Pattern
Why 16,000 MCP Servers Appeared in Less Than a Year
Sixteen thousand servers in less than a year. That growth didn't come from marketing—it came from architectural decisions that removed every barrier between developers and deployment. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol optimized for velocity over control, autonomy over gatekeeping. The design worked. Integration friction disappeared. Developers built what they needed without waiting for vendor roadmaps. Understanding why this happened reveals what changes when protocols prioritize developer experience above everything else.
The Organizational Work MCP's Architecture Doesn't Include
The architectural choices that enabled MCP's rapid growth assumed something most organizations don't have: the security infrastructure to handle distributed responsibility. Forty-three percent of publicly available servers contain command injection vulnerabilities. The protocol's design left security vetting, credential management, and operational governance for deploying teams to solve. That organizational work—building capabilities most teams lack—turns out to be harder than writing the servers themselves. The velocity came with a bill.
Production Gap Reality Check
Microsoft announced Work IQ at Ignite as the intelligence layer that makes Copilot "know you, your job, and your company inside and out." APIs are live now. Some features already power Copilot enhancements. Others arrive in preview early 2026.
Here's what the launch materials gloss over: this only works if proper permissions, data quality, and governance already exist in your Microsoft 365 environment. Work IQ's value fundamentally requires the data hygiene you've been postponing for years.
At scale, you're not deploying AI. You're auditing every SharePoint permission, cleaning metadata, establishing governance protocols that should have existed before cloud migration. Microsoft is selling the engine while assuming you've already built the road. Most enterprises are discovering they haven't.